It was a few years ago somebody pointed out to me that the whole UFO-pyramid narrative boils down to saying, “these poor primitive brown people couldn’t possibly achieve what we have achieved…” Anything that shows the ingenuity of ancient people is cool in my book.

I don’t think that the sand was wet with water…
Back home, whenever there is a building project, one just offers beer to one’s friends in exchange for their labor. Since Egyptians were quite fond of the suds themselves, I assume that is how they got people to lay their shoulder into moving those blocks. Having 100k people drinking beer is going to generate a lot of full bladders…
Notice how many of the fellows in front have loincloths that are stained yellow, while those in back are nice and white – they were obviously encouraged to just let it go man.

So this explains how they might have transported the large stones from wherever they were mined to the base of the pyramid, but doesn’t suggest how they would actually elevate them to stack them on top of each other to construct a pyramid.

It’s not like we need to move heavy blocks on sand much, but they would probably have dealt with this challenge to some extent on a number of projects. While it is ingenious, it’s also not surprising that they found this sort of solution.

Yep. The reason it’s so fascinating is that we have a very different technological basis for our society. When we look at the pyramids, or the obelisks, our perspective doesn’t take their thousands-of-years-old, mature technology into account. For them, that was just how it was done, based on countless generations of experience and improvement. It was no more wondrous or unusual for them than digging a hole with a backhoe is for us.